HOW stupid, how selfish, how absolutely idiotic would you have to be to cause a car crash because you were using your mobile phone while driving?

Tragically, the answer to all is still probably ‘about average’.

Despite the screamingly obvious dangers of even trying to use your phone while at the wheel, it is still frighteningly common in our county.

All of us know someone who does it, who has done it, and many of us would have to admit we have done it ourselves at some point: we might say ‘oh yes, but I was only pulling out of the driveway’, or ‘oh yes, but I was only skipping to the next track on my playlist’, but any one of these tiny excuses is not acceptable.

As firefighter Andy Ford says in our paper today, it literally takes a second: one second where you were so impatient that you could not wait, and you could take a life – and destroy your own.

Mr Ford reminds us all of one of the most horrific car crashes that we have ever seen in this area, the August 2016 tragedy where lorry driver Tomasz Kroker drove into the back of a family car on the A34 at East Ilsley, killing mum Tracey Houghton, her sons Ethan, 13, and Josh, 11, and their 11-year-old step-sister Aimee.

Seconds before the crash, a camera in Kroker's cab had recorded him scrolling through the music on his phone.

He was just 30 when he was given a ten-year jail sentence, but the reality is that he has a life sentence – living with what he did that day.

He was not a bad driver, per se – or at least that was not the cause of the crash: he wasn't even trying to drive; he wasn't paying attention: he looked away for a few seconds and killed four people.

It's one of many similarly terrible cases we could cite.

Imagine being a firefighter having to respond to that kind of scene.

Our message today is simple: just don't do it.

However important it is, it can wait until you stop. It has to.